US Representative Don Young of Alaska Blames Friends of Suicide Victim for the Suicide

Rep Don Young (R, AK), not a suicide expert.

The last time we heard from Representative Don "We Used to Have 50-60 Wetbacks" Young, he was displaying his ignorance of economics. This time our Wingnut Hero is blaming friends of a suicide victim for the suicide, comparing gay marriage to bull sex, and bossing students around for how they hold their hands while daring to confront the great and powerful Republican congressman.

I shit you not.

But then, witnesses say, Young said suicide shows a lack of support from friends and family. 

That comment stunned students and staff still mourning the loss of a student who died Thursday, staffers say. 

"When I heard 'a lack of support from family' and I heard 'a lack of support from friends,' I felt the oxygen go out of the room, but I gasped as well," Spargo said. "It just isn't true in these situations. It's just such a hurtful thing to say."  

Both Spargo and Swick say a friend of the victim, moved by emotion, shouted at Young, “He had friends. He had support.” 

“The kid said, ‘It’s depression -- you know, a mental illness,' ” Spargo recalled. As she remembers, Young replied, “ ‘Well, what, do you just go to the doctor and get diagnosed with suicide?’ ” 

At some point during the exchange, several school staffers say, the congressman also used either the words "---hole” or “smartass.”

My only regret about this story is that in a room full of high school students, apparently no one used their cell phone to record the event. Maybe they didn't expect the fireworks from a US Congressman.

The real hero of this story is Wasilla junior Zachary Grier, who, had heard that the Congressman had threatened to hurt his opponent, Democrat Forrest Dunbar, because Dunbar had touched Young's arm. Young Zach apparently has a sense for wingnut pressure building up, as he decided to ask a couple of questions that just might keep the congressman angry and talking.

Grier got up and asked Young about Ballot Measure 2 that would legalize recreational marijuana -- “he was completely against it” -- and followed up with questions about the Kodiak debate. Young twice told him to get his hands out of his pockets. Grier complied politely, several witnesses said. 

He got in one more question, this one about same-sex marriage.
“I asked why is it so bad in your eyes?” Grier said. 

As Spargo described it, Young answered, “You can’t have marriage with two men. What do you get with two bulls?” 

Witnesses say Young then said something about a lot of "bullshazzle" or some word resembling the more familiar obscenity.

Colorful language for a high school, but more telling is the tendency of these older scumbags to jump right to the animal sex when asked about homosexuals. Kind of makes one wonder what happened to the congressman during his formative years... Of course, Young didn't care much for a smart ass (and I use the word with respect and admiration) kid, so he ran and tattled to the school principal:

Spargo talked briefly with Young on his way out. He asked her about the student who shouted at him. The principal said he was a friend of the boy who died. “ ‘I’ll take care of it,’ ” she told Young. 

“He told me, ‘That boy needs to learn some respect,’ ” Spargo recalled.

Blame a kid for his friend's suicide, and then say that kid needs to learn respect. This is the GOP political philosophy in a nut shell.

New Mexico State Senator Bullshits about the History of Gay Marriage

Proof you don't have to know history
to get elected. Source: The Advocate

Via TPM, I see New Mexico State Sen. William Sharer is bullshitting about the history of gay marriage.

He says, for instance that Alexander the Great ordered his men to stop whoring around and marry women in the places they conquered.

Alexander the Great (356-323 BC) married a Bactrian woman – modern day Afghanistan.  Alexander may have engaged in homosexual activity, but he married a woman. 

He directed his officers to stop “whoring” around and find a local woman to marry.

Bill's not much of a sharer, or he'd provide a link for his source on this. Alexander wanted his men to marry local women in order to better control the conquered people.  And I can find no reference that Alexander, who famously had a gay lover himself, ordered his men to stop "whoring" around. I'd bet Senator Sharer just made that up.

The Greeks, along with many other ancient people, had forms of gay marriage. The Bible, which I'd bet the Senator thinks is a history book, also had some interesting forms of marriage that didn't include what he'd call a "family." But who knows? Maybe his definition of family includes multiple wives, including forcing raped women to marry their rapists, war widows to marry their conquerors, and other fun stuff that often gets left out by Christians when they speak of Biblical marriage.

The Senator did manage to get something right:

Marriage was a well established system long before any Bible totin’ Christian ever walked on this continent.

But wait! The wingnut keeps talking!

Nowhere in Native American tradition has marriage been anything but the joining of men and women. – Although some tribes did allow some leaders to have multiple wives.

From the PBS film Two Spirits.

Native Americans indeed had a system of marriage well before any white people got here. Unfortunately for this bigot, that system included Two-Spirit people. They were gay. They married people of the same sex. They held special status in their societies.

These facts are easy to find for someone who cares about such things.

This bigoted wingnut goes on to mention a whole slew of completely unrelated things, including the 10th amendment (they never mention the 9th) to justify his bullshit.

Marriage is important because it is the foundation of the family...

Got that old folks, infertile folks, folks who don't want babies? No marriage for you, says the marriage Nazi.

Sex between a man and a woman produces babies – society needs babies – babies need both moms and dads.

Just forget all the evidence that gay couples raise children who are often better adjusted than those raised by straight couples, and there is no evidence that mixed sex couples raise children any better. And just forget the fact that soon women won't even need men to get pregnant.

Not that facts matter to this guy.

We've Been Discriminating Against You for Two Millennia So You'll Have to Wait a Few More

Samuel Alito in '72. Was he one of the 70%
against interracial marriage then?

"Traditional marriage has been around for thousands of years. Same-sex marriage is very new."—Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito

You've been discriminated against, lynched, murdered, beaten, vandalized, assaulted, forced to live in a closet, think you were a sinner, and going to hell for 2000 years while the Bible was telling people they could marry the virgin they raped or the widow of the man they killed in battle, so, yeah, you're just too "new" to give rights to.

And, of course, this wingnut bigot kept talking. Clarence Thomas is at least smart enough to keep his fool mouth shut.

But you want us to step in and render a decision based on an assessment of the effects of this institution, which is newer than cell phones or the Internet? I mean we—we are not—we do not have the ability to see the future. On a question like that, of such fundamental importance, why should it not be left for the people, either acting through initiatives and referendums or through their elected public officials?

I can see the early argument against interracial marriage .. "You want us to render a decision based on an assessment of the effects of this institution, which is newer than the wheel..." I'm sure Alito would have been one of the great many who had a problem with the marriage of Frederick Douglass and Helen Pitts.

John Rogers pointed out, in 2005:

...when the Supreme Court struck down the bans against interracial marriage in 1968 through Virginia vs. Loving, SEVENTY-TWO PERCENT of Americans were against interracial marriage. As a matter of fact, approval of interracial marriage in the US didn't cross the positive threshold until -- sweet God -- 1991

Our modern Supreme Court, ladies and gentlemen, so far behind the times that they use the argument that they're behind the times to suggest we should all stay that way.

The WIngnuts Think They Should Keep Saying the Same Mean Things in a Nicer Way: Huckabee Edition!

Mike Huckabee and Ted Nugent on Fox, natch.

One of my favorite inevitable wingnut debate moments is when they say mean, bigoted, horrific stuff about people, but they try to say it in a nice way. Common variations of this theme include "I'm not calling anyone names" or "I'm not knocking anyone for their lifestyle choices" or "I still love sinners." They pile up the dead bodies that result from the implementation of their policy, but they put a nice bouquet of roses on top to cover the smell of rotting flesh and make it look like they really care for the people who perished due to lack of health care, persistent poverty, gun violence, ectopic pregnancy, or wars we were lied into. But, hey, if they could just find the right guy to put a good spin on the destruction, it will make them look like the steel-spined authority figures who do the hard things we must.

Today's installment focuses on Reince Preibus (take out the vowels and you get RNC PR BS), who perpetuates the GOP myth that bigotry toward gays is a great policy position, as long as you put a big, fat, smiley face on it, because, you know, "tone."

Republican National Committee chairperson Reince Priebus said on Friday that former Arkansas governor and far-right culture warrior Mike Huckabee (R) should be the example by which all Republicans should abide with regards to LGBT rights and marriage equality.

The Raw Story mentions several examples of Huckabee's happy-happy-joy-joy version of loving the sinner but hating the sin. He's got a million of them. Here he is being nice to gay people:

"I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk."

See what he does there? It's not you nice, kind, gay people who are aberrant, unnatural, and sinful. It's your lifestyle! Here's another example, where he was asked if homosexuality is sinful:

Well I believe it would be -- just like lying is sinful and stealing is sinful. There are a lot of things that are sinful. It doesn't mean that a person is a horrible person. It means that they engage in behavior that is outside the norms of those boundaries of our traditional view of what's right and what's wrong. So, I think that anybody who has, maybe a traditional worldview of sexuality would classify that as an unusual behavior that is not traditional and that would be outside those bounds.

You're not a horrible person! You're just out of bounds! And don't get him started on abortion, because you're not really evil, you're just making a deadly choice for that little globular-cell-person your rapist blessed you with because it's convenient:

[Civilization cannot survive if] "one group of people have life and death control over another for no particular reason other than their own conveniences and, in that case, prejudices."

Mikey no likey, on Fox, natch, via Slacktivist.

He was saying abortion was like slavery, because it gives someone ownership of someone else, as if wanting to rid the growth of cells in one's uterus is like owning the slave you beat to death. But the way he cross dresses his desire to force rape victims to have their rapists' babies in the language of the abolitionists makes him a much better choice to be the person who will have to explain this to the rape victim as she is being forced to give birth. This seems to be the suggestion from the RNC PR BS ideology generator, anyway.

His capacity to forgive (as long as there's a better target to blame) seems almost limitless. After the Newtown school massacre committed by a disturbed kid with his mother's weapons that had no trigger locks, Huckabee found it in his enormous heart to not blame the shooter, or the mother, or the lack of a trigger lock law. No, Mike has bigger fish to fry: he blames all us heathens who don't want our kids to have to stand in the hall while the teacher leads a Christian prayer:

We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools... Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?

Of course, I always wonder what these guys would say when the Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist children want to pray in school. More diverse schools would have to add an hour to the school day just to get through them all. Or, we could just replace biology class with prayer.

My real fascination with the man (who, if Intrade was still around, I would put a little on to win the GOP nomination in 2016) is with his faulty logic that leads him to beliefs so heinous that smiling while he says them, or phrasing them in kind terms, just makes it seem that much more horrific.

I don't think the issue's about being against gay marriage. It's about being for traditional marriage and articulating the reason that's important. You have to have a basic family structure. There's never been a civilization that has rewritten what marriage and family means and survived. So there is a sense in which, you know, it's one thing to say if people want to live a different way, that's their business. But when you want to redefine what family means or what marriage means, then that's an issue that should require some serious and significant debate in the public square.

Notice how politely he re-frames the gay marriage issue into a fight for the very survival of our civilization? See how he's just fine with you sodomites going about your unnatural, sinful, unhealthy business, so long as you don't drag our whole society to ruin by asking for the same rights as, say, interracial couples did before Loving v. Virginia?

Another problem here isn't with Huckabee per se, it's with the reporters who don't keep him talking about the really interesting points, like, well, there's never been a civilization that survived, period. They all collapse, and the fallacy (argumentum ad ignorantiam!) of blaming the redefinition of marriage, which has, thank goodness, been done many times since Biblical times, is fascinating to me. And yet I can find no instance of a reporter having drilled down on that point. Does Huckabee really think that passing laws that say rapists can't force their victims to marry them, or soldiers can't force the woman they just widowed to marry them, are the reasons those societies collapsed? Does he have examples of civilizations that survived because they allowed polygamy and all the other kinds of Biblical marriage to continue?

From the Washington Post 

Somebody please keep this wingnut talking about these things. Potential GOP voters have the right to know!

Maybe if you put on a happy face while you discriminate against gay people (note that gays decided the election for Obama), lie us into war, support the killing of innocent people with the death penalty (his answer on whether Jesus would be for the death penalty is quite telling), and force rape baby births, people will like you more! After all, when you're down this low, there's nowhere to go but up, right?

The War Between the States is Why We Have Gay Marriage

From the 16th Arkansas Infantry site.

Via Right Wing Watch, I see that former Constitution Party Presidential Candidate and Bible-Jackhammerer Michael Peroutka was on Steve Deace's radio show propaganda catapult again, this time to tell us that Lincoln freed the gays!

Part the first: God!

But what we really need is a dose of reality, what we need to do is wave reality over this situation and go back to what God called marriage, not what the state has perverted the definition to be but what God called marriage. That’s what we need to return to. There is no way we are ever going to validate homo or sodomite-marriage because God defined marriage as between a man and a woman once and forever.

Apparently, Peroutka doesn't read KTW, or he'd know that he might not care for the Biblical definition of marriage. Or maybe he would; the whole slaves-have-to-marry-their-masters thing might just work for him, since the Human Rights Campaign called Per­outka an “active white supremacist and secessionist sympathizer.”

Part the second: More Power!

"...there have been a number of watershed events in American history that have taken us away from this view that I’m describing, this American view. One of them was ‘The War Between the States.’ Ever since then there’s been this huge black hole of centralized power that’s formed in Washington D.C. People sometimes talk about ‘The War Between the States’ as being about the issue of slavery, I believe that history is written by the winners, it wasn’t about that at all. What it was about was consolidating power into the hands of a few people."

Like most wingnuts, the "hands of a few people" he's blabbing about are the 435 voting members of the House of Representatives, the 100 US Senators (where, in theory, 11.3% of the 50-state population could stop any bill from becoming law), the nine Supreme Court members, and the President. So, Peroutka's "hands of a few people" that the civil war gave so much power to is really 545 people.

But we already knew wingnuts have trouble with math. Physics, too, seems to be a problem, since a "black hole of centralized power" would be where centralized power gets sucked out of existence. But then, this guy probably thinks the earth is 6000 years old, so...

Civil War Monumnet, Cherry Valley, NY, photo by Robin Supak

Like most confederate apologists, Peroutka is trying to spread misinformation about the Civil War. I've even seen this kind of bullshitting rewrite of history up here in "Upper Appalachia" where wingnuts in trucks with Confederate flag stickers flip off the monument to the Union dead as they drive by. I love to keep wingnuts talking, of course, but we must be sure to always challenge this particularly vile lie.

The best way I've ever seen to debunk this I learned from Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has famously said that the Civil War isn't tragic. It's something to celebrate, because it was a successful battle in the centuries long war on black people.  If you find it necessary to explain this obvious point, point the bullshitters to the Cornerstone Speech by Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, and maybe it'll get through their thick skulls:

The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell." 

Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.

I hope Michael Peroutka keeps talking, so we can all hear how the Civil War is why we can't return to Biblical Marriage, where raped virgins have to marry their rapists, soldiers can marry the widows of the man they just killed, men can have multiple wives, masters can marry slaves, etc. Maybe more people will start to realize that the Civil War wasn't tragic.

Untangling the Untaglable: an Exercise in Twisted Logic, Gay Hatin' Edition

As a stagehand, I would often wind up on "outs" where all the cable was in a tangled heap that we spaghetti monsters would spend hours unwinding. Cables would have "assholes" or odd kinky backwards twists, which were called the various names of former union Business Agents. So, I got used to untangling hopelessly entwined messes that no logic could explain.

And yet, I cannot for the life of me follow the logic from this wingnut:

They’re trying to redefine marriage. It’s a completely disordered relationship and when you have a disordered relationship, you don’t ever get order out of that. So I’m more than happy to take a ‘no’ vote on the issue of homosexual marriage. 

[...] 

I’m more than happy to stand up and take a courageous vote here on this issue because it’s the right thing to do. Essentially what they’re trying to do is not just redefine marriage, they’re trying to redefine society. They’re trying to weasel their way into acceptability so that they can then start to push their agenda down into the schools, because this gives them some sort of legitimacy. And we can’t allow that to happen. The rights to marriage… it’s really a natural right… 

It’s the natural right of the child to be with both parents, either in an adoptive nature or in a biological nature. To not have a mother and a father is really a disordered state for a child to grow up in and it really makes that child an object of desire rather than the result of a matrimony.

First find a straggling end of something coherent from State Rep. Jeanne Ives (R-Wheaton, Ill.) and pull. "Redefine marriage." That looks good. Let's give it a tug and see where it leads.

Click for the big version.

Yeah, it looks like we've been redefining marriage a lot since biblical days. Maybe we should keep up the good work, eh? So, that's a dead end. Next we find "redifine society." Rep. Jeanne Ives is from Illinois, where Lincoln was from. She's even in the same political party as Lincoln. I'd think she'd know a little about the redefinition of society that took place under that President. Perhaps Rep. Ives is familiar with Grace Wilbur Trout, a suffragette from Illinois who had a little to do with some societal redefinition. So, yeah, it seems society needs a good redefining from time to time. Or perhaps Ms. Trout disagrees with the 13th and 19th Amendments to the US Constitution? Either way, dead end.

So, the next frayed logical end to tug on (and I'm skipping "They’re trying to weasel their way into acceptability" because it just looks too ass-holier-than-thou) looks like this doozy:

"To not have a mother and a father is really a disordered state for a child to grow up in and it really makes that child an object of desire rather than the result of a matrimony."

Um, yeah, here's where I get lost. Right before this, she notes that adopting is cool. This somehow doesn't apply to a gay parent who might want to adopt the child they love. But if she really believes that not having a father and mother is disordered, and therefore makes the child an object of desire, then I'm guessing either she's a bullshitter who doesn't care what the truth is and is just talking out her ass, or she's actually not aware that many children grow up with only one parent for many reasons. Sometimes a parent dies. Does this mean the surviving parent "desires" that kid and doesn't actually love her? I'm honestly lost here. Maybe best to just walk away and leave that tangled mess there to collect dust along with the rest of the history she seems to love so much, because my best guess is that she's just a bullshitting bigot.